The Cities of Eternal Fog

Walk in darkness, hunt in fog.

Forgetful Mind

A vampire with this power can literally delve into a
subject’s mind, stealing or reshaping memories at whim.
The power, as with all uses of Dominate, requires eye contact.
The Forgetful Mind does not allow for telepathic
contact. Instead, the vampire acts much like a hypnotist,
asking direct questions to draw answers from the subject,
and then describing in detail any new memories she wishes
to impose on the victim. Simple alterations, such as blurring
brief and recent memories, are easy enough (and very
effective for eliminating evidence of feeding or other Masquerade
breaches). More comprehensive alterations, up
to and including a complete reconstruction of the victim’s
past and even identity, are possible albeit substantially
more difficult.

The victim’s subconscious struggles to resist false memories
implanted from without, so the degree to which the
vampire details new memories has direct bearing on how
fully the subject assimilates them. An incomplete or simplistic
false memory shatters much more swiftly and easily
than does one with more attention to detail. For instance,
“You drove home after work and had a very bad evening” is
not likely to hold up. Far more effective would be an account
such as, “You left work late, due to a last-minute
change ordered by the client. You still managed to get stuck
in rush hour for an extra 25 minutes, and you were seriously
frustrated by the time you pulled off the freeway. There
weren’t even any good songs on the radio. Three blocks
from home, a cop pulled you over for coasting through a
stop sign. At least he only gave you a warning, but it was
still just one more hassle. The frozen dinner you
microwaved was awful, the TV movie starred some hasbeen
you didn’t like, and the news was depressing. You finally
turned off the TV in disgust and went to bed.”

Truly effective use of The Forgetful Mind, then, requires
substantial finesse and patience, as well as the ability to carefully
and thoroughly think things through ahead of time.
It’s fairly simple to sift through a victim’s memories and strip
out recent events without even knowing precisely what happened,
but doing so leaves a gap in the memory that can
lead to further problems. Most people aren’t comfortable
realizing they’ve lost a few hours or a night’s worth of memories,
and they’re likely to try to find out what happened.

Even new memories that the character imposes rarely have
the same strength as the originals, and they can be broken
or at least contradicted through investigation. For instance,
a victim might not recall that she was attacked by a vampire,
but she might remember being bitten, chalking it up to
an animal attack or a spider. More vivid memories can return
as snippets in dreams or be triggered by an unusual olfactory
stimulus or spoken phrase. The process might take
weeks or even years before the victim can begin to make
sense of these flashes, but even the most effective memory
manipulation is far from perfect — or truly permanent.

A vampire may also use The Forgetful Mind to sense
whether someone has had her memories altered in this
fashion, and he can sometimes use his own power to draw
forth and restore the original thoughts. No Kindred may
use The Forgetful Mind to restore his own lost or altered
memories, however.

Cost:—

Dice Pool: Wits + Persuasion + Dominate – Resolve

Action: Extended (1-100+ successes, based on the detail
and complexity of memory; each roll represents five minutes
of mental manipulation)

Roll Results

Dramatic Failure: The attempt fails, and the subject is immune
to the character’s Dominate until the next sunset. All
accumulated successes are lost and the subject continues to
remember what happened.

Failure: The attempt fails.

Success: The character makes headway toward altering a
block of memories.

Exceptional Success: The character makes considerable
headway toward altering a block of memories.

Even a single success pacifies the victim for the length of
time it takes to complete the process. Both vampire and subject
must be safe and relatively composed when this power is
used; it cannot be used to calm someone already in combat,
for example.

To restore stolen or false memories, or to sense when memories
have been altered, a character must possess Dominate at
a level equal to or greater than that of the vampire who first
tampered with the subject’s mind. If such is the case, the player
then makes a contested roll in each stage of the extended
action, to be compared against the initial user’s attempt, and
must score more successes than the predecessor did.

Suggested Modifiers

Modifier Situation

+2 Power is turned on a vampire with whom the
user has a blood tie (see p. 162).

-1 to -3 The character’s description of the new memories
is lacking in detail.